Substituting excel cell with a condition

Question

I have an excel column A which contains some data. If the cell starts with </li> then the every </li> should be replaced by <u> . The formula should not replace </li> appearing any where except the first one.

Answer 1

Try this formula, (obv sub A1 with the cell where the text to replace are):

=IF(LEFT(A1;5)="</li>";SUBSTITUTE(A1;"</li>";"<u>");A1)

But if you want to replace only the first instance in the cell who start with , you should do:

=IF(LEFT(A1;5)="</li>";SUBSTITUTE(A1;"</li>";"<u>";1);A1)

We use the "instance_num" parameter of the substitute function, to tell her to replace only the first instance, here what happens: